Experienced Voices

When an entrepreneur takes the road less traveled, it is literally true for Colin Godby, co-founder of Dust Moto, an innovative startup launching a high-performance electric dirt bike. Colin’s entrepreneur journey began as a young power sport enthusiast which led him to be an off-road co-driver in international competitive events including the Baja1000 and the TransSyberian Rally.  

Colin shares how he used his mechanical engineering background to transfer his professional experience and passion for motorsports into a new product---that he believes will attract more dirt bike enthusiasts and expand the sport. He describes his team’s process of product innovation that resulted in a new bike design with features that significantly enhance user experience.

Josh Brown is an entrepreneur, inventor, founder, and CEO of Dropshot, a smart scoring platform designed to enhance Pickleball scorekeeping– the fastest-growing sport in America. Josh applied his 14 years of software engineering experience to address a pain point of passionate pickleball players like himself---how to keep score that easily eliminates on-court confusion and scoring squabbles.

In our discussion, Josh shares how he moved from product idea to market testing to Kickstarter success through manufacturing to market introduction. He shares his entrepreneurial and product design approach, offering insight to others pursuing product innovation. 

Kasey Edwards, CEO and Co-Founder of Helpr, a global technology company transforming corporate caregiving benefits, shares how their company scaled its services using digital technology to achieve great success. 

Helpr now serves Fortune 500 companies such as Clorox and Snap through its enterprise platform and is in 45 countries. 

Hear how Kasey and her partner saw the opportunity offered by digital technology to grow their model and the steps they took to become a global technology company.

Broc TenHouten, Co-founder and CEO of Intrinsic Power, Inc., is a leading authority on the challenges of distributed energy and a technical leader and manager of electric vehicle technology commercialization. Hear how his startup identified and solved major pain points impacting consumer use of EVs, while addressing capacity challenges facing our country’s electrical grid.  Broc offers great insight about the future of electric vehicles and his approach to launching a tech startup.

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic exemplify national challenges requiring a new approach to achieve the most effective technological solutions. 

NobleReach Foundation’s CEO Arun Gupta is taking on those challenges, heading a nonprofit startup with half a billion dollars in endowment. Founded as a spinoff of LMI, NobleReach offers a new and ambitious model to drive American innovation through the collaboration of academia, and the private and public sectors.

Arun is a highly successful venture capitalist, a best-selling author of Venture Meets Mission, a Faculty Lecturer at Stanford University, and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Georgetown University. 

He is marshaling the U.S.’s brightest entrepreneurs to drive this innovation model.

Serial entrepreneur Byron Bennett began his entrepreneurial journey in high school, never expecting that one day he would lead a venture called Zergratran to build in Columbia an alternative to the Panama Canal. He shares the challenges he is facing which include raising funds for a venture of significant scale. His stories of earlier ventures illuminate the unique path of an entrepreneur while offering insight helpful to aspiring and fellow entrepreneurs. 

Vitaly Golomb is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who most notably co-founded HP’s corporate venture arm. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of  Sofielabs, the next-gen CRM that uses AI to automate the sales process. 

Hear how AI was applied to the costly weak link of sales and how their startup strategically emerged from stealth to take on Hubspot and Salesforce which dominate the CRM market.

Trevor Laudate heads the award-winning startup Ecodrive, a B2B climate tech platform connecting companies to measurable sustainability projects such as tree planting and harvesting plastic from the ocean. Customers find these environmental and social activities appealing which companies see as strengthening loyalty and yielding other desired customer outcomes.

Trevor shares how they developed their model, formed their leadership team, and gained the attention of investors, winning a $300K investment at the San Diego Angel Conference. 

CEO Stacey Yudin has experienced the full arc of digital technology, leading NEP Services' Union and Non-profit clients from legacy processes and structure to specialized digital technology platforms. Stacey shares how NEP learned about their customers' pain points and established collaborative working relationships---that is ongoing with new technology such as AI. Stacey also delves into the excitement of building an innovative company as part of Industrial 4.0 and her commitment to fostering a dynamic culture of teamwork.

Patricia Lizarraga is the Founder and Managing Partner of Hypatia Capital Management.  Leveraging her 30+ years of experience on Wall Street, she and her co-founder launched in 2023 an ETF comprised solely of female-led publicly traded companies, WCEO.  

Hear how she navigated the launch of this unique financial model that highlights the performance of women executives and increases their prominence within the institutional investor community.